On 13 January 2015, XenData, a provider of digital video archive solutions to the media and entertainment industry, announced that Crew Cuts, a full-service post-production house, has installed a XenData SX-522 Archive Server managing a robotic LTO library to help upgrade and automate its complete workflow. The new server and library have permitted Crew Cuts to achieve greater efficiencies and create a very dynamic and collaborative environment.
With extensive expertise in commercial and film editing, production visuals and sound mixing, Crew Cuts has worked with some of the biggest networks in entertainment. To keep pace with its customers’ ever-increasing demands and level of production, Crew Cuts chose to upgrade and automate its workflow. In doing so, Crew Cuts required a more centralized storage and collaborative production management solution that would eliminate existing storage silos that, in some instances, spanned several external and personal drives, making collaboration difficult and disjointed.
As a result, Crew Cuts needed a more adaptable long-term storage solution that would seamlessly integrate with the new entirely automated workflow. In addition, the new archival storage had to be a data repository for all projects previously housed on Crew Cuts’ external storage.
Striving to achieve its long-term goals, Crew Cuts selected an integrated solution with three main components: the XenData SX-522 Archive Server, a FilmPartners MXFserver collaborative post-production system and an axle Gear Media Asset Management system, all of these components supplied by T2 Computing.
With these three key components in place, Crew Cuts has gained:
• A simplified and very effective project management process. Managing the workflow around human-centric projects stored in virtual containers that provide the collaborating post team access to all the needed materials. All materials are always protected against accidental or unauthorized deletion.
• A universal, virtualized storage server infrastructure that can concurrently support any of the leading post-production applications and tools in the industry regardless of their manufacturer.
• Crew Cuts can easily reuse materials from older projects because it can now effortlessly catalog content to make it easier to find digital assets and retrieve them when necessary.
• A powerful archiving capability suitable for both current and old projects. Crew Cuts has the capability to archive complete projects on low cost storage and to easily restore full projects or selected individual files.
Source: Creative Cow
